Hell on wheels? Sure, why not?

Crossing India is an adventure. Crossing India during monsoon season is a punishing adventure. Crossing India during monsoon season in a flimsy motorized rickshaw ... are you kidding?

Michael Fitzgerald

Crossing India is an adventure. Crossing India during monsoon season is a punishing adventure. Crossing India during monsoon season in a flimsy motorized rickshaw ... are you kidding?

That's 3,000 miles of highly uncertain, mud-bogged, Third World boondocks. But, come August, two local adventurers are going to go for it.

The Rickshaw Run, a grueling endurance race from the city of Shillong, in eastern India, across the subcontinent to Fort Kochi in the west, doesn't even offer a prize.

"I might get a T-shirt, if I'm lucky," said one of the competitors, Brian McElwain.

McElwain, 31, is a lawman with a local law enforcement agency. Asked why he would do such a dangerous, demanding thing, he replied: "Just to say I did it."

Because it's there. "It sounds challenging," McElwain said. "It's something to do to get out before I have full-blown family. Kids, all that stuff."

Speaking of family, McElwain does have a girlfriend.

"She says I'm nuts," he said.

She may be right. The Adventurist, a company that specializes in breathtakingly bold and brutal adventures, calls the Rickshaw Run "genuinely dangerous."

"Individuals who have taken part in the past have been permanently disfigured, seriously disabled or lost their life," its website warns, thus becoming perhaps the only company to use the world "disfigured" in its sales pitch.

"You really are putting both your health and life at risk," it goes on, adding, "That's the whole point."

What are the hazards? Getting lost, for one. The Adventurist provides no race route or maps. Contestants must find their own way across India's vast, underdeveloped countryside and swarming cities.

Mechanical breakdowns, for another. Contestants are given "tuk-tuks" - small runabouts with the squirrel power of absurdly inadequate two-stroke motors.

Given the primitive state of some India roads, not to mention the monsoons, mechanical breakdowns are virtually guaranteed. I asked McElwain if he was a good mechanic.

"No, not really," he admitted.

As for the monsoons, one travel guide calls the season "an intense period of heavy rain, booming thunder and plenty of lightning," adding, "many cites experience flooding."

"We're going to get wet," McElwain said, channeling Nostradamus.

The U.S. State Department's safety and security advisory adds, "India continues to experience terrorist and insurgent activities ... demonstrations and general strikes, or 'bandh,' often cause major inconvenience and unrest. ... Religious violence occasionally occurs."

Uncle Sam also mentions "salt-water crocodile attacks."

McElwain sees another side to the race: a grand gamble outside the softness of modern life, a stern test in an unfamiliar land among a foreign people.

"It's really getting out of this country and seeing what other people are like. Seeing good people, the hospitality that you get," he said.

Or inhospitality. The race starts Aug. 5. McElwain hopes to traverse India by Aug. 21. Though there is no telling whether he can make it by then. Or at all.

That's the point.

"It's going to suck," McElwain said. "But I'm looking forward to it."

Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog and on Twitter @Stocktonopolis.